VOORHEES, N.J. — The Flyers had a good day Wednesday, and not only because they didn’t have a game to play.

With a few extra hours between naps, they put in some much needed practice time, spending much of it on special teams drills. That is expected to happen again today, as part of the collective problems that have spurred this 2-5 start is lack of practice time.

Maybe by Friday they’ll be able to see a difference. But they better be ready to do so from the start.

“We’re in good shape,” Danny Briere insisted after that much needed practice time at the Skate Zone. “We played a very good opponent yesterday. They got the breaks, but we’re not that far off. We’re right there.”

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Indeed, the Flyers were within a game-tying goal amid a dominating yet ultimately futile third period in Madison Square Garden Tuesday night in what became a 2-1 loss to the vaunted New York Rangers. But all the special drills in the book can’t completely cure what ails this team, as even Briere would have to admit. What he saw as encouraging signs late in the Rangers game should go as a lesson to the Flyers, Briere says, because he’s still wondering why that kind of play from his teammates couldn’t have been evident earlier in the night.

So along with necessary drilling in the fundamentals of power play and penalty killing, it might be just as important to see how well the Flyers can change their inward approach, trying to transfer the energy they showed late in New York in time for the start of their next game, Friday night in Washington.

“We have to come out just as hungry,” Briere said. “We have another road game on Friday but we have to come out the same way we finished that (New York) game. Try to build off that. For us, a lot of it is about attitude when we hit the ice on Friday.”

As for the scary-bad stats, all the positive energy and fast starts they might muster won’t help the Flyers if they don’t improve their special teams, and their offense in general. The power play and penalty kill are both ranked near the bottom of the league, and the Flyers have only averaged 2 goals per game. And that includes the 7 they put on the scoreboard against the Panthers.

One change the Flyers did make was to bring in 40-year-old Mike Knuble, always skilled at finding ways to score power play goals by getting into those required tight spaces in front of the other team’s net.

“There are things you have to get together in order to do well this year,” Knuble said. “Power plays were obviously 100 percent of our focus today. ... Sometimes it just comes back to basics; a reminder to get pucks to the net. You have to get a little chaos going.”

“We know we have a lot of work to do,” Wayne Simmons added. “If you’re just going to sit there and sulk, you’re not going to get much accomplished.”

So they got up and worked, and will do so again today, with the goal of giving it their all for an entire game against the Capitals. One motivating factor, Briere noted, was the steady and impressive play of goalie Ilya Bryzgalov. Perhaps the Flyers can build around that.

“Bryz has been playing well,” Simmonds said. “We want to help him out. We want to score him goals, we want to get him wins. He’s going to be playing that way for the rest of the year. Hopefully we can figure this out and help him get wins.”